Hopelessly Unromantic (In honor of National Marriage Week)

I never intended to get married. In my teens and early twenties, the idea of marriage seemed to be the antithesis of romance to me. I predicted that whatever fireworks there were in a relationship would be put out immediately by legalities and technicalities – in fact, I was pretty skeptical about romance in general. I had come to suspect that I just might not be a fireworks kind of girl.

And I certainly didn’t plan to have babies. I had never been especially taken with children, and as a teenager, I was a terrible babysitter. The kids walked all over me – I found the younger ones kind of frightening, in a Children-of-the-Corn-sort-of-way. My year of working in England at a boarding school was a disaster. But isn’t that how it goes – you make it reasonably clear to the universe that you’re not interested, and BAM.

In my case, I met a gorgeous and astoundingly nice and clever guy who showed me that I was, in fact, the fireworks kind of girl. Over the next few years, I learned that I was not only the sort to fall in love, but the sort to stay in love. I stayed in love through unemployment, through psychotic roommates, and through a little spot of deportation, and we were married three years after we met. Since then I have fallen – and stayed – madly in love two more times, with two little boys, aged four and two. Who hardly frighten me at all.